Something happens. You have an emotional reaction. By now, you know this is the basic starting point for the practice of Stoicism in the daily lives of us normal folks. Events are objective, our interpretations are not. They are a guess, a story, an opinion as to what’s happened and what it means, and whether or not our actions are governed by those instant interpretations is a good indicator of exactly how stoically we’re behaving.

We interviewed Dr. Lisa Barrett, author of How Emotions Are Made, for the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge. Given Dr. Barrett’s pioneering work in the study of emotion, we asked her to give us her view on Epictetus’s famous observation that every situation has two handles—or two interpretations—and that we decide which one to grab, we decide what story to tell ourselves, we decide how we react. Out of anger or with understanding? Forgiveness or fear? Lust or indifference? Do we yell at our employees or teach them?

Dr. Barrett liked the idea and added that there are usually more than two handles. She provided a slightly different lens through which we might look at Epictetus’s observation. Instead of seeing two handles, she said we might ask, “Is this the only story?”

Is this the only interpretation that fits here? No? What are my other options? What are some other stories I could make up about what happened here?

You don’t have to have the imagination of an award-winning storyteller to look through this lens. As Dr. Barrett also talked about, you can reference your past experiences for guidance. The last time your kid spilled orange juice on you, you interpreted it as an accident and laughed about it. Instead of losing your temper this time, tell yourself that story again. That other time an employee used poor judgment, your first thought was to take this wonderful opportunity to teach them something you also learned the hard way. Maybe go with that one again instead of letting your mind race toward paranoid assumptions about insubordination or corporate espionage or violations of fiduciary duty. Maybe they just had a bad day and made an honest mistake…

In every situation, you can find a better story to tell yourself about the person who cut you off in traffic, about the cashier in the checkout line you’re stuck in, about the email you still haven’t gotten a reply to, about the player who isn’t performing the way you need them to.

You just need to be aware enough of the circumstance and of your mind’s own tendency to react, in order to consider other options, to see other handles, to ask, “is this the only story?”